only 59 patients, and during the hospital’s first five full years of operation a mere 397 patients checked in, many of them charity cases. Father O’Brien’s own sister, Sister Mary Raphael O’Brien, M.D., joined her brother in 1893 and headed up the newly formed St. Camillus School of Nursing. Borgess survived the tough decade of the 1890s with the assistance of various donations and fundraising bazaars, lawn socials and raffles. By 1900, the hospital managed to make a small profit, which was applied toward its $8,000 indebtedness. The following year, Borgess broke ground for a major four-story addition fronting Portage Street. Additional improvements followed in 1903 and 1907. The mansion that had served as the first hospital, which was by this time hidden from view by the additions, was converted into an “Old People’s Home,” a tradition of care for the elderly that the Sisters continue to this day.
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Despite the various additions that brought the number of beds to 100, overcrowding and obsolescence at Borgess Hospital had reached serious proportions by World War I. Work began on a “new” Borgess Hospital on a tract of land on Gull Road in 1916, and on Sept. 19, 1917, the first patient arrived at the four-story red-brick structure. The original hospital on Portage Avenue, referred to as Old Borgess, remained in use as an emergency hospital until it closed its doors in 1929. It lay vacant until 1933, when the Upjohn Co. purchased and razed it. Fittingly, the original site of Kalamazoo’s first hospital now houses the new Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. Monsignor Francis O’Brien would be proud. The hospital was named for Bishop Casper E. Borgess, who donated $5,000 of his own inheritance to start Kalamazoo’s first hospital.